UMG’s East Africa Unit Buys the Melodica Catalogue, Not the Shop That Built It

Universal Music Group’s East Africa business has bought the recorded catalogue of Melodica, the Nairobi record shop and label that has spent more than half a century documenting Lingala, Benga and Congolese-influenced music across East and Central Africa. The deal was announced in a UMG statement in late June and early July 2026, quoted independently by two Kenyan outlets on consecutive days. Neither the price nor the precise scope of rights transferred has been disclosed by either party.

What is clear: UMG now controls the recordings. What is not clear, and what no source reviewed for this piece resolves, is whether that means master rights alone, or masters plus the publishing and mechanical rights sitting underneath decades of songs that were never formally registered anywhere international labels would routinely check. It is also not established whether Melodica the business, its Tom Mboya Street shop, its 1,000-plus reel physical archive and its ongoing retail operation, changed hands at all. Every source describes a catalogue sale. None describes a company sale.

What Melodica is

Melodica has operated from the ground floor of Elimu Co-operative House on Nairobi’s Tom Mboya Street since 1971, when the shop took that name after moving from an earlier address under the name Bonanza. Its founder, remembered in the record as Daudia Pravinlal, is said in one account to have opened his first Nairobi music shop as early as 1952. Accounts of the exact founding year differ by seven years and disagree on which name came first; both agree the current proprietor, Abdul Karim, took over management in 1980 after his father’s death, and has run the shop for the 46 years since.

Beyond retail, Melodica operated its own label and functioned as an informal publisher, and for a period it pressed vinyl regionally, before Kenya’s pressing plants closed in the late 1980s and left the shop as a seller of stock rather than a manufacturer. Its catalogue includes Orchestra Grand Piza, Angora Youngstars, Orchestra Sentima and Congo International, along with earlier releases credited to Bana Ngenge, Kakuta and Orch. Conga International. Much of it has never been digitised. That is the catalogue UMG says it has now acquired.

What UMG says it bought

In its statement, UMG described the catalogue as representing “an important era in East African music, capturing the sounds of the 1980s when Lingala and Benga dominated the streets, dance halls, radio stations, and live performance spaces across the region,” and framed the deal as a preservation move rather than a commercial signing: “from Congo through Zambia to Kenya, bands brought people together through unforgettable rhythms, live instrumentation, and timeless storytelling.”

Alongside the announcement, UMG’s East Africa unit released “Mandalala” by L’Orchestra Grand Piza to streaming platforms, a track originally issued on the Bana Moja label and manufactured by Melodica Music Stores, credited to songwriter Makengo Roy. UMG’s statement placed Orchestre Grand Piza specifically within “the history of Lingala and Congolese-influenced music in East Africa,” noting its association with the Bana Moja and Diabim labels and its role in a 1970s-80s movement that connected Congolese sound with audiences in Kenya and Uganda.

One of the two reports carrying UMG’s statement adds that the Melodica purchase followed an earlier UMG East Africa acquisition, described only as an “AI catalogue,” with no further detail offered on what that catalogue contained or when that deal closed. Nothing in the sources reviewed here explains that reference, and it is noted rather than interpreted.

The gap between the two claims

The distinction between owning a catalogue and owning a company is not a technicality here, it is the whole story. If UMG bought Melodica’s recorded masters outright, the shop on Tom Mboya Street, its archive of reels and its day-to-day retail business could continue operating exactly as before, selling second-hand vinyl to collectors and researchers, while UMG separately controls what happens to those same recordings on Spotify, Apple Music and Boomplay. If instead this is closer to a full acquisition of Melodica’s business, ownership of the shop and its physical stock would sit with UMG too. Every source consulted describes only the former. None mentions a change of control at the retail premises, a change of name on any register, or Abdul Karim’s role after the deal. Absence of a detail is not evidence the detail is false, but it means this piece cannot assert more than what was said.

Territory is similarly loose. UMG’s own language reaches for Congo, Zambia, Uganda and Kenya as the catalogue’s cultural range, not as a defined legal territory of the rights acquired. Whether UMG now controls exploitation of these recordings worldwide, or only within East Africa, with rights elsewhere resting with other parties, was not addressed in either statement.

Why a major wants a 1980s Nairobi vinyl catalogue

The commercial logic is not exotic. Streaming has made catalogue, especially undigitised regional catalogue nobody else can license, a genuine asset class. A major with distribution into every DSP in the region can put decades-old Lingala and Benga recordings in front of listeners who have only ever heard them, if at all, on cassette or FM radio nostalgia programming. Digitisation costs money and expertise that an independent Nairobi shop, run as a family business for two generations, was never resourced to spend at scale. UMG framed the deal explicitly around that gap: digitise, reissue, and use streaming’s long tail to reach both nostalgic older listeners and younger audiences discovering the era for the first time.

It also fits a wider pattern this publication has tracked through 2026: major and near-major companies buying African-origin heritage rights rather than developing new artists in the region. Reservoir Media’s acquisition of Lion King composer Lebo M’s publishing catalogue, and its subsidiary PopArabia’s acquisitions of Egyptian and Middle Eastern labels, are the same instinct applied to different regions: buy proven, decades-old rights rather than bet on unproven new signings.

What this means for artists

For the surviving members of Orchestra Grand Piza, Angora Youngstars, Orchestra Sentima and Congo International, and for the estates of musicians no longer living, the practical question is whether a deal like this produces any payment at all, and to whom. Recordings this old, made and distributed informally through a regional shop rather than a registered label with modern contracts, routinely have no clear paper trail establishing who is owed what. A catalogue acquisition announcement does not, by itself, tell an artist or estate that royalties are now flowing, at what rate, or against what accounting.

Any Kenyan, Congolese, Zambian or Ugandan musician, or musician’s estate, with recordings that passed through Melodica should treat this announcement as a prompt to check three things directly with UMG East Africa rather than assume anything from the coverage: whether their specific recording is included in the acquired catalogue, what rights were transferred for it, and what royalty structure now applies to streams of recordings already released, including “Mandalala.” A UMG statement praising an era of music is not the same document as a royalty statement, and nothing published so far substitutes for one.

The broader lesson for anyone holding pre-digital African catalogue is that “we bought the catalogue” from a major is now common enough, this is the third such acquisition by a UMG-adjacent or comparable rights buyer covered on this site in 2026 alone, that a one-line company statement should not be mistaken for full disclosure of what changed hands, for how much, or under what rights. It rarely is.